Geoffrey Hinton, the British-Canadian computer scientist whose research became the backbone of modern artificial intelligence, was born in London in 1947. He studied experimental psychology at King's College, Cambridge before completing a PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in 1978, and has been affiliated with the University of Toronto since 1987. His central contribution is foundational work on artificial neural networks and deep learning, including his 1986 paper that popularised the backpropagation algorithm and co-inventing the Boltzmann machine in 1985. In 2012, Hinton and his students built AlexNet, an image-recognition system that dominated the ImageNet challenge. In 2018, he shared the Turing Award with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, and in 2024, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics with John Hopfield. Hinton resigned from Google in May 2023 after a decade at Google Brain to speak freely about AI dangers. By December 2024 he estimated a 10 to 20 per cent chance of AI causing human extinction within 30 years, flagged AI-assisted bioweapon creation as an immediate short-term threat, and called for government regulation, international cooperation, a global ban on lethal autonomous weapons, and universal basic income.